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A few weeks ago, I switched my development environment from Windows to Linux, on a project which was developed so far on Windows only. In this post, I want to describe the issues that brought me to this switch, a short overview how I did the actual port, and some observations on Linux for developers. This is the first post in a series of at least two, the second post will describe the tools I use on Linux right now....Actually, the switch is so simple that Microsoft should get concerned. For instance, I have been developing mainly on Windows since several years, and I occasionally tried Linux, but I never did a complete switch due to various smaller and bigger problems. However, since 1-2 years, the Linux desktop, together with the tools, is good enough to provide some real benefit, especially if you cannot access the latest Microsoft products. Microsoft used to have the best developer tools by far, and quite stable APIs, which were in my opinions the corner stones of their success. However, they’re changing APIs now rather quickly (WinForms? WPF? WinAPI?), they provide new platforms which require rewriting your application....

In a followup post, Antero lays out his tools:That’s probably the tools which account for 99% of my work time. I hope you find this list useful if you come also try to get started with Linux development, at least I would have saved some time if I knew it beforehand What’s very nice about nearly all of this tools is that installing them is very easy, as they are free and directly available from the package manager – something which I miss on Windows.